Coding and climbing
Mar. 20th, 2014 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylSpent a moderately successful afternoon profiling and refactoring one of my codes to try to reduce its epic memory footprint and improve its dismal performance. After noticing that almost all the time was being spent performing metadata lookups — the code matches names against metadata information by inode number — I realised that if I replaced the general walk with some targeted seeks, I ought to be able to speed things up and reduce the amount of memory needed to reconcile the two lists. After rejigging the code to merge the seek operations into the name lookups, I was able to reduce the runtime by two-thirds on my smallest test case — which represents a huge saving, given that my largest dataset contains 100+ million items.
And with that triumph behind me, I dashed off to the quay for an evening of climbing and general snarkiness. I broke in my new shoes — G soundly mocked me for wearing women's shoes (the only difference is they're turquoise rather than orange) but in my defence they were the only ones in my size in stock that I could actually get me feet into. And although they're not entirely discomfort free, they don't apply pressure to my poor battered achilles tendons which counts for a lot given the all the time I've spent over recent weeks icing my feet to keep the swelling down.
Through chance we bumped into A, who was hanging around waiting for his buddy to arrive. I completely failed to realise that it might have been polite to offer to belay for him — we were just standing around gossiping at the time — so R made me go over and suggest it, only for A to say that he was happy to wait. In revenge I persuaded R to do her nemesis route which, thankfully, she polished off with no trouble and then graciously accepted my apology for being such a meanie...
And with that triumph behind me, I dashed off to the quay for an evening of climbing and general snarkiness. I broke in my new shoes — G soundly mocked me for wearing women's shoes (the only difference is they're turquoise rather than orange) but in my defence they were the only ones in my size in stock that I could actually get me feet into. And although they're not entirely discomfort free, they don't apply pressure to my poor battered achilles tendons which counts for a lot given the all the time I've spent over recent weeks icing my feet to keep the swelling down.
Through chance we bumped into A, who was hanging around waiting for his buddy to arrive. I completely failed to realise that it might have been polite to offer to belay for him — we were just standing around gossiping at the time — so R made me go over and suggest it, only for A to say that he was happy to wait. In revenge I persuaded R to do her nemesis route which, thankfully, she polished off with no trouble and then graciously accepted my apology for being such a meanie...
